Friday 12 February 2016, 1:00pm - 1:00pm

Friday lunchtime lectures are for everyone and are free to attend. You bring your lunch, we provide tea and coffee, an interesting talk, and enough time to get back to your desk.

Shelter helps millions of people every year struggling with bad housing or homelessness through advice, support and legal services. Having made significant investment in technology over the past five years, Shelter is just beginning to peer into the open data realm and the vast possibilities that lay there. This talk explores how Shelter is starting out on its open journey: formulating partnerships, developing pilots and starting to explore how opening our data can help more people.

Paul McMullan is on a mission to unlock the potential of Shelter’s historical data. He has been working in the technology change team at Shelter for five years, implementing CRM technologies. Paul is focussed on exploring the hidden side of things and seeing how data can help provide insight and help shape decisions, to impact upon issues and drive innovative new ways of thinking.

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About our Friday lunchtime lectures

With a broad range of topics in open data such as tracking government expenditure, British landscape mapping and creating art, there’s bound to be something that interests you.

The sessions run from 1pm to 1.45pm weekly during UK school term-times, with informal networking until 2pm. Each lecture lasts for around 20 minutes, leaving time for questions afterwards. The lectures don't require any specialist knowledge, but are focused around communicating the meaning and impact of open data in all areas of life.

Each week the lectures are streamed live on YouTube and then uploaded to our YouTube and Vimeo channels. You can also download the Friday lunchtime lectures as a podcast on iTunes.

You can follow the lectures and contribute to the discussion using #ODIFridays on Twitter.